Henry David Thoreau

The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.

Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading.

Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let our affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand...Simplify, simplify!

I think that there is nothing not even crime more opposed to poetry to philosophy ay to life itself than this incessant business.

Misfortunes occur only when a man is false.... Events circumstances etc. Have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.

I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually. If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing? I must know a little more.

The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

What is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?

Wildness is the preservation of the World.

A man thinking or working will always be alone, let him be where he will.